UK show draws the line for Australia

When Stephen Coppel started work at the British Museum in 1992 its Australian prints and drawings collection was, despite the historical links, a fairly threadbare affair.

The Bicentennial folio, 25 prints by 25 leading Australian artists given by the federal government to 20 museums around the globe in 1988, formed its backbone, plus whatever had washed up at the museum’s door since.

There was certainly a lack of reciprocity. “There was no place where anyone could really study Australian art in the [UK] public collections, whereas in Australia every one of the state galleries, the National Gallery and many of the regional galleries had very serious examples of modern British art,’’ says Coppel, who now curates the department’s modern collection.

“There was nothing comparable in the UK. And given that so many of Australia’s leading artists had spent important parts of their career here, it made sense to try to build one."

Almost 20 years later, the change is stark. The British Museum now holds about 880 works by Australian artists in a prints and drawings department comprising nearly 3 million items, making it one of the most encyclopaedic in the world.

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Most of its Australian holdings are works created since the 1940s, collected almost entirely through donation since 2003.

The best of these are now on show in an exhibition of 125 works by 60 artists that the museum has dubbed “the first big show of Australian art of any kind in London for over a decade, and the first exhibition of Australian works on paper of this scale and ambition to be held outside Australia".

Out of Australia: Prints and Drawings from Sidney Nolan to Rover Thomas, which runs until September 11, starts with the Angry Penguin artists such as
Albert Tucker
,
Sidney Nolan
and
Arthur Boyd
, who spent many years in the UK after the Second World War – in Nolan’s case the rest of his life. It moves through
Fred Williams
– who studied in London for five years in the early 1950s – and John Brack, one of the few who stayed home; George Baldessin,
Brett Whiteley
, Robert Klippel, Robert Jacks and Jan Senbergs; finishing up with
Ricky Swallow
, Brent Harris, Rick Amor and numerous Aboriginal artists, including Rover Thomas and Queenie McKenzie.

The collection highlights the role relationships and serendipity have played in getting Australian work into international institutions – and our enduring eagerness to be appreciated offshore. Coppel began collecting Australian prints and drawings following the gift to the museum in 2002 of 70 etchings and nine drawings, gouaches and watercolours by Lyn Williams, the widow of Fred Williams.

It was that gift, shown the following year, that highlighted the museum’s lack of Australian content, a hole Coppel decided to fill. With an annual acquisition budget of £10,000, however, the only way he could do that was through donation.

It helped that he was Australian, and knew James Mollison, the inaugural director of the National Gallery of Australia, where Coppel had worked for 10 years. Mollison spent weeks around the 2003 Williams show trawling through the British Museum’s print room, and became well aware of the holes in its Australian collection.

Mollison was instrumental in providing introductions. He also helped convince Sydney collector John McBride, who attended the opening of the Williams show, to allow the museum first pick of his contemporary Australian collection. Philanthropists Gordon and Marilyn Darling also provided two scholarships, which allowed Coppel to travel to Australia to knock on the necessary doors, and helped fund a substantial exhibition catalogue. Mollison and the Darlings also donated works.

“After the Williams exhibition I went about approaching artists and artist’s estates to see whether they could help us assemble a really important collection of Australian graphic art. I must say the generosity was overwhelming,’’ Coppel says.

Donors included Helen Brack, Barbara Tucker, Mary Nolan, Barbara Blackman, Tess Edwards Baldessin and Andrew Klippel. Publishers Bernhard and Anne Baer donated multiple works, and in 2009 the Australian Print Workshop gave the museum 117 prints by 45 artists, all dating from the late 1980s to 2007.

Given the way the collection was amassed – relying on Coppel making contact with the right people, and them agreeing to donate – there are inevitable gaps. Germaine Greer was critical of the show on BBC radio, querying the authenticity of a Rover Thomas print and remarking that there were some “really extraordinary absences". The fact that she didn’t recognise some of the artists in the show, most of whom would be well-known to the Australian art world, somewhat weakened her point (Coppel says there is no doubt Thomas made the print late in life).

The show is the centrepiece of an Australian season at the museum, complete with kangaroo paw, wattle and desert pea in the museum forecourt. The British-headquartered
Rio Tinto
has come on board as sponsor of the season, which runs until October.

The inclusion of Aboriginal art in the main show highlights its rise to become the most recognised form of contemporary Australian art abroad. The picture was quite different in the early 1960s, when the Whitechapel Gallery and Tate in London held shows of Australian art. “There was no Aboriginal art in those exhibitions, no
Albert Namatjira
, for instance,’’ says Coppel. “It would be inconceivable to contemplate doing an exhibition of Australian art without a serious aboriginal art component."

Printmaking was big in the 1970s, when Baldessin’s Melbourne studio was a magnet for other artists. It’s not nearly so fashionable now among collectors, who tend to prefer unique items to works produced in edition. Coppel argues, however, that Aboriginal art has revived printmaking over the past decade, not least through workshops such as Darwin’s Basil Hall Editions and Melbourne’s Australian Print Workshop, which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary.

“In Aboriginal art, printmaking is a disseminator of Aboriginal identity, and at the same time it preserves [culture],’’ Coppel says. “Print is a perfect medium for that. Works can be made in multiple form, distributed relatively easily, and moreover, are much more affordable than a unique work."

Coppel has curated exhibitions around other countries – Mexico, the US, German expressionism, Picasso and printmaking in Paris – similarly building collections before showing them.

He is likely to now turn his attention to another theme or country, but one suspects with an eye peeled for further Australian acquisitions.

“Obviously there are artists we don’t have that I would love to have,’’ he says. “There is nothing by
Lloyd Rees
, for instance, or
Russell Drysdale
. Why? I just wasn’t able to make the right connections. That doesn’t mean their work won’t eventually come here. One day I’m certain we will get good work by these artists into the collection."